Regular stars collapse and die once they run out of fuel for their nuclear reactions, but the white dwarfs just sit there, hanging out, for eternity.
All motion is relative. That simple fact makes tracking the motion of distant objects outside our galaxy particularly challenging. For example, there has been a debate among astronomers for decades about the path that one of our nearest neighbors, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), took over the last few billion years. A new paper from Scott Lucchini and Jiwon Jesse Han from the Harvard Center for Astrophysics grapples with that question by using a unique technique - the paths of hypervelocity stars.
